novelraw Chapter 111: Tang Xiaoxue Takes to the Kitchen Herself
Chapter 111: Tang Xiaoxue Takes to the Kitchen Herself
These past two days, Li Qiuchen had in truth been using his injury as an excuse to slack off.
Everything he knew had already been wrung out of him by multiple groups of people asking the same questions over and over, as though terrified he might have left out some crucial detail.
He did have leads, but they were all subjective speculation with no objective evidence to back them up.
That kind of speculation was not something you could go around sharing freely. The people above were already anxious to find someone to blame. If they acted on your words, went off to investigate, and came back empty-handed, nothing good would be waiting for you.
He had gone out for a walk and was just arriving home, about to step inside, when he spotted Tang Xiaoxue lurking furtively in a corner of the courtyard with a food basket in hand.
This is your home. What exactly are you hiding for?
Li Qiuchen walked over and asked quietly, "Young miss, were you looking for me?"
Tang Xiaoxue gave a nod, then seemed to have whatever she wanted to say go straight out of her head the moment it reached her lips. She stood there frozen on the spot.
Li Qiuchen was long past being surprised by this kind of thing.
Tang Xiaoxue was actually quite a sharp child, and it wasn't as though she had any aversion to learning. Given the right approach, she could memorize texts with impressive speed.But the thing was, her mind tended to operate on a single thread.
Set her on one task and she would be completely focused, even improving as she went. But give her several things to handle at once and it all fell apart. She would descend into a fog of, "Wait, what was I just doing?" and "Wait, what am I supposed to be doing now?"
Li Qiuchen didn't overthink it. He said quietly, "It's alright, take your time. Let's go inside."
He had a small side room to himself in the courtyard, near the rear garden. He had originally shared it with Liu Da, but after his sister-in-law and godmother arrived, Liu Da had moved next door on his own initiative.
They stepped inside, and Tang Xiaoxue gave a small sound of recognition as her mind came back online.
"I made you chicken soup."
Ah?
Li Qiuchen nearly thought he'd misheard.
You made what? Chicken soup? For me?
"Why did you make me chicken soup?"
"You're injured, aren't you? Sister Shaoyao said to make you chicken soup to help you recover."
Oh... Governess Zhang said so. That made considerably more sense.
Because Tang Xiaoxue going to the kitchen to make him chicken soup of her own accord was, no matter how he thought about it, deeply unsettling.
Could you imagine lying in bed burning with a forty-degree fever, and the family dog shuffling over to boil you a bowl of noodles with a poached egg on top?
Deeply disturbing.
Li Qiuchen quickly took the food basket from her and set it on the table, then turned around and said with a smile, "Thank you for the kind thought, young miss. You really don't need to do this sort of thing yourself in the future. Besides, as you well know, the injury isn't anything serious."
"I know."
Tang Xiaoxue slipped off her shoes, stepped onto the kang in her snow-white socks, padded across the woven mat to Li Qiuchen's neatly folded blankets, and plopped herself down.
"But you did save my life, and Sister Shaoyao said a single drop of kindness should be repaid with a rushing spring. She told me to come and repay you."
Your way of repaying me is to make me chicken soup?
Nothing wrong with the method per se, but...
Li Qiuchen ventured cautiously, "Did you make this yourself?"
"Yes."
"..."
Tang Xiaoxue hugged her knees and stared at him. "You doubt my cooking?"
"Doubting it requires there to be some in the first place."
"That's a rather rude way to speak to this young miss, don't you think?"
"It is, admittedly."
Li Qiuchen thought for a moment and rephrased, "May I ask, young miss, when exactly did you learn this particular skill?"
"Today. Just now."
"..."
Li Qiuchen shifted himself, without any visible expression, a little further from the food basket.
Tang Xiaoxue fixed him with a sideways look and said nothing.
Li Qiuchen felt the pressure mounting.
"Er... did Sister Shaoyao give you any other instructions?"
"She did."
"What did she say?"
"She said to treat you well and let you have a taste of something sweet."
"And so?"
"So I put some rock sugar in the chicken soup."
How much was "some"?
Li Qiuchen slid himself further back along the kang without any change in expression and settled against the wall.
"I don't think what your Sister Shaoyao meant is quite what you're imagining."
"Then what did she mean?"
"Hmm... it's hard to say exactly, but I think..."
"I'm not old enough to have children yet anyway."
"I beg your pardon?"
That topic just leapt straight to the moon.
Li Qiuchen was about to point this out when something clicked.
Wait. No.
The topic hadn't leapt anywhere.
"You actually understood?"
"What wouldn't I understand?"
Tang Xiaoxue blinked her large eyes and stared directly at Li Qiuchen.
"Back home where I'm from, every night young and vigorous men would come and perform outside the tent to show off their talents. If the tent mistress liked what she saw, she'd pull him inside. If she didn't, she'd give him a beating. Once he was pulled inside, they'd be in there pulling each other's trousers down and wrestling bare-bottomed..."
"Stop, stop, stop!"
Li Qiuchen hurriedly cut her off.
My innocent mind just had a considerable quantity of unsavory and obscure knowledge crammed into it without warning.
"You are the young miss of the Tang family now. A young lady of refinement. You cannot go around talking about things like this, do you understand?"
"I know!"
Tang Xiaoxue put on a look of complete innocence.
"I'm not saying it to anyone else. Even Hu Caiyi doesn't know."
"You can't say it to anyone, it doesn't matter who. A young girl simply cannot go around casually talking about pulling people's trousers down and wrestling bare-bottomed. Do you understand?"
"Tch..."
Tang Xiaoxue quietly pressed her lips together.
"Hmm?"
"Fine, fine, I got it!"
This child was perfectly agreeable in every way as long as she wasn't speaking. The moment she opened her mouth, the things that came out gave you palpitations.
"Are you going to drink the chicken soup or not?"
"I'm not hungry right now. Leave it there for the moment."
"You're not going to wait until I leave and quietly pour it out, are you?"
"Absolutely not."
The two of them were still locked in this standoff when Hu Caiyi's bright, chattering voice came drifting in from outside.
"Xuexue! Xuexue!"
Hu Caiyi had come for a visit, gifts in hand.
Li Qiuchen and Tang Xiaoxue went out to find her standing at the gate directing her family's servants as they unloaded things from a carriage.
Big boxes, small boxes, red ones and green ones, a whole assortment of odds and ends.
When people in the north came calling on someone, they tended to bring a great deal with them. It wasn't a matter of etiquette so much as the simple fact that local goods were abundant and prices were low.
Mountain ginseng and sable fur that would fetch astronomical prices in the south were, in Yun County, simply expensive but ordinary items, luxuries of a more everyday kind. Valuable, but not extraordinarily so.
The furs covering Tang Xiaoxue's bedding had all come from Hu Caiyi.
For reasons no one could quite explain, Hu Caiyi was particularly fond of the cellar Tang Xiaoxue had dug, and had wanted to dig one for herself at home, only to be flatly refused by Boss Hu.
The two of them were kindred spirits in that way.
What normal girl would willingly crawl into a cellar, let alone spend an entire day happily playing in one?
Li Qiuchen could only attribute it to the fox clan's innate burrowing instincts.
This time, everything Hu Caiyi had brought was expensive medicinal ingredients, ginseng, lingzhi mushrooms, deer antler velvet, dozens of boxes of various sizes, enough to make Li Qiuchen suspect she had simply swept through an entire pharmacy.
Her family dealt in furs. She knew nothing about medicinal ingredients. Her approach had likely been to buy whatever was most expensive.
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